In disposition, the writer was a kind-hearted man, and in spite of a great deal of public and private business, he found time to help other people in their troubles. He twice redeems a debtor out of the House of Correction at Chesterfield, and endeavours to assist him when imprisoned there for the third time. He writes on behalf of “Whittles’ boy”—“a poore ffatherless and Motherless boy, an object of pitty to move one, if not to releeve him, yet to helpe him to right from those who would doe him wrong”—to the Rector of Aston and Sir Francis Fane, begging them to hear and determine the differences between the lad and his “knavish uncles”; provides him with clothes and other necessaries, and finds money to release him from a cruel master and to keep him from starving. He sets himself to help Mr. Leigh, of Coldwell Hall, who had lately fallen into a sad condition of poverty; pays £4 in order to have a son, Joseph Leigh, apprenticed to a tailor in Sheffield, and urges another son in London to “write by the next post after this comes to you, to hould up the hartt of the ould man.” Later on, he drafts a petition on behalf of the father applying for a place in the Duke of Norfolk’s Hospital or Almshouse, at Sheffield. He urges a spendthrift husband to make a settlement of his property upon his wife, who had brought him a little fortune in marriage, and was willing upon such terms to free him from his debts and to maintain his children. He endeavours to incline to mercy the creditors of a former maidservant at Renishaw, who had married a man already deeply in debt, seeing that she was willing, in her own phrase, “to part with all they had, quick and dead, to pay theire debts, soe that they might have the freedome to beginn the world new and to live by theire labor.” It was a common practice at this time for litigants to avoid the cost and delay of a lawsuit by referring their quarrel to some neighbouring gentleman for his “doom and award,” and Mr. Sitwell, believing arbitration in such cases to be a “very charitable good worke,” both rendered such services himself, and made arrangements also on behalf of others. He was “shy of his reputation” in Derbyshire, where he was “well known in his country”; anxious to do his duty by his children, and not, as he puts it, “to bringe trouble on those I leave behinde me”; and considered the possession of a good estate carried with it “an ingagement thereby to be regardfull of the welfare of one’s Country.” It may be inferred from the use of certain phrases in the letter-book that then, as now, public spirit, truthfulness, and courtesy were considered to be the distinguishing marks of the class to which he belonged.